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Stand for Something: Down with Pundits

The New York Times' The Argument is one of my favorite podcasts.
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This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

The New York Times' The Argument is one of my favorite podcasts. The format is three opinion writers (typically Michelle Goldberg, Ross Douthat and David Leonhardt) from different ideological positions discussing their perspective and where they agree and disagree on a weekly basis. It's lucid, respectful, informative and the kind of dialogue I'm sure most Americans wish they could have with the people around them.

In a recent episode discussing the aftermath of the vote to impeach President Donald Trump, the three hosts lamented that no matter what your point of view, it's fairly disheartening to see that the impeachment process didn't seem to change many minds of people in the public. This column is a response to their surprise.

I think there are two pieces to this. The first is that it's probably not reasonable to expect that sort of event to show up in public polling just a few days after the event. Unlike approval voting, impeachment related polls are less often and will just take longer to see a response. FiveThirtyEight's tracker of impeachment polling does eventually show some movement around the vote, but the changes are partisan and wind up canceling each other out.

The more interesting reason I think people's views haven't shifted on President Trump over the past 3 years has to do with media diet. I'm not talking about MSNBC vs Fox News. Part of what's remarkable about our current political era is the stability of people's views not even on average, but both individually and in total. Even events which in other administrations would dramatically swing the president's approval rating, like an extended government shut down or being impeached, result in only comparatively tiny changes.

I believe this is because Americans no longer generally consume news anymore. While engagement with certain news publishers has never been higher, very rarely are people tuning in for 'the news.' The ability for publishers to granularly track what is read and the pressure to fill a 24 hour cable news channel has changed the type of news people consume. Generally speaking, there are three types of journalism people interact with:

1. News: This is a naked description of the facts, with just enough context for the audience to understand what's being written about. This can be recording a public statement or a lengthy investigative journalism piece.
2. Analysis: What is the context for the news? What sequence of events led the people to do the thing that resulted in a news article? Why does it matter? What are the motivations of the people in the story?
3. Meta-Analysis: How have the people involved in the story reacted to the publication of the news? What about the general public? How will the publication of the news change the future? What opinions do people hold? How should people not involved in the story change their behavior in response to the news?

Part of the partisan sickness infecting America, in my view, is the consumption of meta-analysis to the exclusion of news and analysis. This is best exemplified by the pundit -- a talking head paid to be part of a television round table interview, for example. The pundit is not there to recount the facts, they are there to offer an opinion.

A journalist like Jake Tapper or Anderson Cooper has a specific job -- report the news, ask questions to draw analysis from experts. But part of how you drive engagement (and thus money) with the news is to make it personal for the audience. So they add a pundit to take in the news, chew it up, and feed an opinion to the audience like a mama bird regurgitating into a baby bird's mouth.

The problem with adding a pundit to an otherwise journalistic space is that it sucks the oxygen out of the air for the consideration of the facts. Rather than simply engaging with the news, or analyzing what has happened in order to understand the ramifications, the pundit offers a preproduced opinion for the audience to walk away with regardless of the actual relationship to the facts. And for truly engaging TV, you can even add a second pundit with a different opinion so that the pundits can argue with each other. This provides the illusion of a careful consideration of 'both sides' of an issue, but it's typically without a disciplined citing of facts and data along the way because that's boring to watch.

The average news watcher, having gotten a scanty description of the facts and the context around them, will mostly just walk away with the memory of two people yelling opinions at each other. Most people don't arrive at their political opinions due to a careful consideration of many different perspectives and the context of current events -- that's exhausting even for professional journalists. Most people hear an opinion that resonates with them and they adopt it. You can't use facts to talk someone out of a position that isn't fact based. (Apologies to Jonathan Swift.)

Abracadabra, immovable partisanship.

To be clear, meta-analysis can be very useful when presented and consumed responsibly. FiveThirtyEight is 100% meta-analysis, but it's a disciplined synthesis of facts and data. I wouldn't go there to learn about events which change the President's approval rating, but it's where I'd go to understand the approval rating (itself a relatively important piece of meta-analysis). The Argument is also meta-analysis. It puts people with different opinions in the same room and asks them to ruminate over their differences. But in addition to doing a good job of engaging with fact based discussions, the people appearing on The Argument are primarily interested in sharing their view, not in winning the argument. It's meta-analysis as a way to understand people with different views.

Studies have shown that people who consume more locally focused news sources are better informed and less partisan. I believe part of this is that meta-analysis is expensive for small, locally focused newsrooms. Journalists at small outlets like the Longmont Observer do our best to manage bias aggressively -- and news outlets with falling revenues can scarcely afford hired guns to spout opinions. As a result, most local news is just news and some analysis.

If people in positions of journalistic power could adjust the news diet of Americans away from meta-analysis and to more news and more analysis, I think that'd go a long way to fixing partisan inflexibility. It won't be an overnight change -- it'll require a consistent, disciplined choice from journalists and the businesses around them. But unless people in high places push for the change, I think we're stuck with what we've got.